| Back |
WALTER B. RUBUSANA |
| Perhaps the best way to situate Walter Benson Rubusana in South African political and intellectual history is by considering how he appeared to a relatively younger member of the New African Movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a man of great distinction in his own right, founder of the African National Congress in 1912 (then known as the South African Native National Congress), was deeply impressed by the political and intellectual achievements of Rubusana. This enthrallment began in all probability when Seme, together with Richard W. Msimang, and Alfred Mangena as students in London in 1909, met with a delegation of the South African Native Convention, which consisted among others Rubusana, Mapikela and Abdullah Abdurahman, to protest against the insertion of the racial exclusion of blacks in the South African Constitution which made possible the Union of South Africa possible in 1910. By the time Seme wrote "Biographical Sketch" of Walter Rubusana in 1911 in Tsala ea Batho the elder statesman had already accomplished a few things. In 1879, barely passed his twentieth year, he was youngest founding member of the Native Educational Association together with John Tengo Jabavu, Elijah Mikiwane and Pambani Mzimba. It was this Association through its individual members essays in Imvo Zabantsundu newspaper (founded by Tengo in 1884) that succeeded in convincing the Xhosa people to fully participate in the making of modernity in South Africa. They emphasized the importance of education and Christian civilization in this undertaking. When Walter Rubusana and Allan Kirkland Soga in 1897 found the increasingly conservative political posture of John Tengo Jabavu finally unacceptable, they launched Izwi Labantu newspaper. In their newspaper, while Soga concentrated on writing historical essays, Rubusana was more drawn to political manifestoes and political statements. In 1901, he testified to the South african Native Races Committee about the social and political conditions of African people under British colonial domination. By 1905, Rubusana was in London overseeing the publication of a revised Xhosa Bible. Probably it was during this period that he received a honorary doctorate from McKinley University in Chicago (a proprietary non-accredited University, not to be confused with the renowned Roosevelt-McKinley University in the same city) for his book, History of South Africa from the Native Standpoint, atext which has since proved untraceable and unlocatable in the United States and in South Africa. It was in 1906 that Rubusana published in England in Xhosa a book that was seminal in South African cultural history in the twentieth century: the publication of the first edition of the Xhosa classic, Zemk' Inkomo Magwalandini (Away Go the Cattle, You Cowards!), and it second edition in 1911, was determinant in the emergence of great modern Xhosa literary culture represented by outstanding novelists and poets such as S. E. K. Mqhayi, James J. R. Jolobe, A. C. Jordan and others. The book was a compilation of Xhosa prose, poetry and proverbs. Also in this important year of 1911, Rubusana attended the Congress of Universal races in London in which he met Booker T. Washington. Given these achievements, it is not suprising that Pixley ka Isaka Seme's biographical sketch in Solomon T. Plaatje's Tsala ea Batho (The Peoples Friend) was so laudatory: "When men and women receive great public distinction from the hands of sovereigns, the people or of God, the world often forgets that these are rewards for merit or of sublime sacrifices performed. . . . The subject of this sketch is to-day one of the most brilliant evidences of our advance. I [p]raise him in order that by knowing and seeing him we may be guided by his light and that despair may take encouragement and advance. . . . Writing though I am [of] only the first period of this wonderful life story, I have not exhausted the records of HIS GENIUS. The name of Dr. Rubusana could have won immortal distinction in Native literature only. He is the popular and most forceful translator of English works into Kaffir [Xhosa]. His voluminous translations are well known to the Native clergy sand Seminaries today" (January 24, 1911). In the next quarter century of his life, he achieved other distinctions. This is the reason that approximately 70 years later, in the early 1980s, the judgement of Pixley ka Isaka Seme was endorsed by another towering intellectual figure, Jordan Kush Ngubane, South Africa's twentieth-century greatest journalist: "The question to which I address myself is: How did the African writer view the problems created for his people by the establishment of the racially closed society? Walter Rubusana is our starting- point because he set in motion a process of self-definition which was to affect profoundly the thinking of succeeding generations. . . . Rubusana is important for purposes of our discussion because he adopted the view that in a race-conscious society, no group can interpret correctly the mind of any other. No race had the right to prescribe destiny for the others. He couched these principles in language used in his day and presented his thinking in his History of South Africa from the Native Standpoint" ("40 Years of Black Writing", in Umhlaba Wethu, [ed.] Mutloatse Mothobi, Skotaville Publishers, Johannesburg, 1987; it was originally presented as a Lecture at the University of Witawatersrand in 1982). The influence of Walter Rubusana on Jordan Ngubane was so profound that title of his 1963 book echoed that of his master: An African Explains Apartheid. | |